Thursday, 5 September 2013

I'm on the TSA's list of its enemies.

Part of my work with the Identity Project (PapersPlease.org) involves trying to use the Freedom Of Information act (FOIA) to obtain information about the travel surveillance and control activities of the U.S. government's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of which the TSA is a component agency.

It's an endless round of drudgery, involving filing FOIA requests, making multiple follow-up phone calls and sending further e-mail messages and letters to get the requests acknowledged and docketed, nagging FOIA staff to process the requests, filing administrative appeals when requests are unanswered or the responses are incomplete, and yet more follow-up to get those appeals acted on. FOIA requests are supposed to be answered within a month, but even incomplete responses to most of our requests have typically taken many months, often years.

In the course of this work, I've now obtained less-redacted versions of internal TSA and DHS e-mail messages (which were officially released only with the most incriminating portions blacked out) showing that the TSA"s Chief Privacy Officer engaged in a libelous campaign of character assassination against me, with the specific intent to persuade TSA FOIA staff that I'm a lunatic and a liar and hold particular opinions and beliefs (which I don't actually hold) as a consequence of which I and my requests, and those of the Identity Project, should be ignored.

It keeps getting worse: It has now been revealed that the beliefs falsely attributed to me and to the Identity Project by the TSA's Chief "Privacy" Officer are beliefs that had been specifically listed as indicators of terrorist activity in a bulletin distributed to local police by the FBI:

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble." (U.S. Constitution)

"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

"Liberty of movement is an indispensable condition for the free development of a person." (United Nations Human Rights Committee)